Breaking Bread

How the redemption story of troubled baker Dave Dahl began to crumble.

For years, a 6-foot cardboard cutout of
Dave Dahl greeted customers at Dave’s Killer Breadquarters in Milwaukie.
In the photograph, a grinning Dahl—with his baker’s smock, ponytail and
anvil chin—held a tray of the loaves that transformed a once-sleepy
family bakery and made him famous.

But on the morning of Nov. 14, the real Dave Dahl walked into the lobby of the Milwaukie outlet store.

His
hair now cropped short and gray, Dahl berated customers and
employees—“preaching,” according to a 911 call made by Dan Letchinger,
the company’s marketing manager.

Dahl walked over to his photograph.

“He smashed a life-sized cutout of himself,” Letchinger told the 911 dispatcher, “because he is the symbol of a brand.”

Each
Dave’s Killer Bread wrapper carries a cartoon drawing of its namesake,
smiling, confident and strumming an electric guitar. “A whole lot of
suffering,” the wrapper says, “has transformed an ex-con into an honest
man who is doing his best to make the world a better place…one loaf of
bread at a time.”

The
bread is good enough to sell itself, but Dave’s own redemption story is
what made him legendary: a violent criminal and addict gone straight who
created a product people loved.

Ten
hours after his Nov. 14 appearance at the outlet store, Dahl, who turns
51 this week, rammed two Washington County sheriff’s patrol cars with
his Cadillac Escalade. Deputies had been called to deal with a man
having a “mental breakdown.” Dahl faces a felony charge of second-degree
attempted assault with a dangerous weapon. He declined to speak to WW for this story.

The
news was heartbreaking for Dave’s Killer Bread, a family company with
close-knit employees, as well as customers who admired Dahl’s efforts to
stay sober and out of trouble.

“Dave is a real person with real challenges,” CEO John V. Tucker tells WW in an email. “He has been very public about his struggles with mental health and addiction.”

Dahl’s
potential return to prison underscores the risks the company took by
turning him into a cheerful cartoon character on its label—Tony the
Tiger, but with a rap sheet.

It’s not clear what triggered Dahl’s most recent troubles, but five people who know him tell WW he has been drinking since at least 2011. Three say they have seen him become increasingly dependent on alcohol.

The
people who know Dahl say he was drinking when the company sold a
50-percent stake to a New York investment firm in late 2012 to expand
Dave’s Killer Bread beyond the 14 Western states where it’s sold now.

It’s
not clear what the firm, Goode Partners, knew about Dahl’s drinking,
which could pose a threat to the clean-and-sober image used to market
the company’s bread.

“We
are truly and deeply committed to the legacy that we have been handed,”
Tucker, who was named the bakery’s CEO last April, tells WW. “We intend to make Dave’s Killer Bread a national brand. There hasn’t been any change in that plan.”

In 2009, Glenn Dahl told Inc. magazine that the rise of Dave’s Killer Bread depended on his brother staying clean.

“But
if he did relapse?” Glenn Dahl asked. “The company would suffer,
tremendously. I’d do everything I could to stop that from happening.”

REBORN AND BREAD: The Milwaukie headquarters of Dahl family company NatureBake have been renamed Dave’s Killer Breadquarters. On Nov. 14, police visited the outlet store because Dave Dahl was frightening employees and customers.

In
Portland, regional baking brands Franz and Oroweat dominate. Lots of
small bakeries are trying to stay afloat—like the one run for 58 years
by the Dahl family.

James
A. “Jim” Dahl started out making doughnuts in 1955. He began to
specialize in organic breads in the ’60s—a tough market then, made
tougher because he didn’t like the hippies who would become his
customers.

He
created a signature product, a sprouted-wheat bread he called Surviva,
in a shop on Southeast 122nd Avenue and Division Street in Portland.

Jim Dahl died in 1998. For three decades, the family bakery has been run by his eldest son, Glenn, 59.

That
transformation began when Dave Dahl arrived on Dec. 27, 2004, after he
got out of prison for the last time. Glenn Dahl gave him a ride home
from the bus station and offered him a $12-an-hour job at the bakery.

Dave, then 41, never liked working at the family bakery. But Glenn had given his younger brother a chance to go straight.

“Dave was always the most creative among the four siblings,” Glenn Dahl tells WW by email. “He has a wonderful ability to know what tastes good and what might make it taste better.”

Glenn encouraged Dave to work on a line of breads intended to appeal to younger customers.

What
Dahl created were breads so dense with seeds—sunflower, flax, pumpkin
and sesame—that the loaves looked like they’d been rolled in a bird
feeder. Dahl dubbed the breads “killer.”

He
debuted four bread varieties—Killer Bread, Blues Bread, Rockin’ Rye and
Good Seed—on Aug. 4, 2005, at the Portland Farmers Market in the Pearl
District.

The
vegan, USDA-certified organic bread dovetailed with the ascension of
boutique grocers like Whole Foods and New Seasons, and patrons willing
to pay $5 for an artisanal loaf.

The
bakery employs nearly 300 people, producing a line of 15 breads. Until
recently, the company was known as NatureBake. Now, everything it sells
bears the Dave’s Killer Bread logo.

Its
annual sales total $53 million—up from $3 million a decade ago, when the
company started shifting its emphasis away from old product lines as
Dave’s Killer Bread took off.

“I go out there and tell my story,” Dave Dahl explained to The Register-Guard in Eugene in 2011. “People want to hear it, and they’ll buy my bread.”

The power of that story was made stark by the depths Dahl had reached.

The
Dahl family’s third son chafed at his strict Seventh-day Adventist
upbringing. He was drinking, smoking weed and taking hallucinogens by
the time he was a teenager. “Alcohol seemed pretty cool,” he wrote in a
2008 memoir, Good Seed, “releasing my inhibitions and deadening the pain as I bounced my head off of sidewalks and fists.”

He
was tormented by depression. “The strongest memories I have from my
childhood,” he writes, “are those of contemplating suicide.”

He
dropped out of Gresham High School in 1980, took his first injection of
crystal meth in 1984 and was arrested for the first time in 1987, for
burglarizing a house.

Over
the years, Dahl was convicted of eight felonies. He did time in
Walpole, Mass., for armed robbery. He did a year in Oregon after he
shoplifted a $12.99 cellphone accessory from the Wilsonville G.I. Joe’s.
He fought with the G.I. Joe’s security guards who stopped him, and he
battled Portland cops in 1997 after trying to run away to escape a drug
bust.

“Why don’t you just beat me to death,” Dahl asked the arresting officer, “and make us both happy?”

His
last and longest stretch, for a meth-dealing conviction, came at Snake
River Correctional Institution, the state’s largest prison, located
outside the Eastern Oregon desert town of Ontario.

Three
years into his stay, Dahl decided to see a prison psychiatrist. Records
show he was prescribed antidepressants. Dahl has said admitting he
needed help with mental illness transformed him. He started taking
computer-aided drafting classes, and for the first time felt successful.

“I hadn’t found Jesus,” Dahl writes in Good Seed, “but I had found a way of living that gave me the strength to leave the needle behind.”

Dahl’s story and unique bread offered his
family’s company what business executives like to call a “killer
product” —an item that redefines the market.

But it also created risks the bakery had never faced before.

Richard
Shymanski, NatureBake’s longtime sales manager, remembers Dahl pushing
aggressively to give his breads a central place in the company. Dahl
wanted NatureBake to assign full shifts of workers to his bread. He
wanted more space on the company’s shelves in grocery stores.

“We’ve
got a 48-year-old product that we’re married to, basically,” recalls
Shymanski. “Here comes Dave with this new product he wanted us to push,
and push hard.”

Dahl’s pressure to have his products play a larger role created tensions between Dave, Glenn, and Glenn’s son Shobi Dahl.

Shobi
Dahl, 30, graduated in 2005 from Willamette University with a degree in
economics—and joined the family business just as Dave Dahl began making
his own breads. Shobi—who rose to become the company CEO before Goode
Partners invested last year—worked with his uncle on designing the
Dave’s Killer Bread wrappers.

Shobi Dahl declined to speak to WW. An internal 2008 email, first published in a profile of the Dahls by Inc. magazine four years ago, reveals the relationship wasn’t just tense—it was sometimes frightening.

“You
are incapable of intelligent conversation that does not involve
yelling,” Shobi wrote to Dave. “You have an ‘I am god of bread, bow
down’ aura around you that makes me sick to my stomach…. You threatened
to hit me.”

Dave Dahl has said Shobi’s accusations were false. Glenn Dahl told Inc. that Dave never hit Shobi but was sometimes “a fraction of an inch away” from violence.

Shymanski says Dave Dahl won out inside NatureBake because customers demanded his bread.

“He
was right in saying we should have been focusing more on his stuff
earlier,” Shymanski says. “Dave’s Killer Bread is the biggest explosion
I’ve seen in 40 years in the bread business.”

The
boom emerged from a decision by the Dahls: They could have just sold
great bread, but they decided to put Dave front and center in the
marketing scheme.

Each
wrapper includes a personal testimony: “15 years in prison is a pretty
tough way to find oneself, but I have no regrets,” Dahl says in one
version of the wrapper. “If I had not suffered, I can safely assure you
that you would not be reading the label on a loaf of my Killer Bread.”

His fame took off. WW
reported Dahl’s comeback story in a 2006 farmers market feature. Since
then, profiles of Dahl playing up his prodigal-son story have been run
by more than two dozen media outlets, including The Oregonian, 1859 magazine, MSNBC and The New York Times.

He told his story to inmates at California’s San Quentin State Prison and to businessmen at the Portland Business Journal’s
annual power breakfast. “You start now,” he told teenagers at Salem’s
Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility in 2011. “I don’t have a lot of
respect for people who aren’t making changes in their own lives.”

Dave’s
Killer Bread took that idea seriously. The company worked closely with
mental-health nonprofits. Nearly 30 percent of the company’s employees
are ex-cons.

Lee
Warren, a convicted felon, started working at NatureBake in January
2011, and left last year to start a bakery for Iron Tribe, a
Clackamas-based drug and alcohol recovery program for ex-cons. He’s
known Dahl for more than a decade.

“When Dave is Dave,” Warren says, “he’s given so many people second chances.”

It’s not clear when Dave Dahl’s redemption
story fell apart. But by the middle of 2011, he was drinking again,
according to what three of Dahl’s friends tell WW. It was something he and his family knew could jeopardize the business.

Glenn Dahl and other company officials declined comment on when they knew the company’s icon was drinking.

By
last year, the company was looking for outside investors, people who
would sink millions into Dave’s Killer Bread to expand the brand,
largely on the reputation of Dahl and his clean-living story.

They
found one. On Dec. 27, 2012, Dahl announced it himself. “Hey, guys,
I’ve got some killer fucking news,” Dahl said in a Web video, the
company bleeping out the obscenity.

The
amount the New York-based private equity firm Goode Partners invested in
Dave’s Killer Bread has not been made public. Goode Partners’ website,
however, says the investment firm usually sinks $10 million to $30
million into its ventures.

Goode
Partners specializes in taking regional brands and launching them
nationally. The firm did this recently with the Austin, Texas-based
Mexican restaurant chain Chuy’s.

Perhaps
its best-known success is Skullcandy, the Utah headphone manufacturer.
Goode invested in the company in 2009. By 2011, it made an initial
public offering of stock, which is now traded on the Nasdaq market.

Industry experts say whether or not the Dahls mentioned Dave’s drinking, his addiction history added risk to the purchase.

“It
probably wouldn’t stop me from buying,” says John von Schlegell,
managing director of Endeavor Capital, a Portland-based private equity
firm that has invested in WinCo Foods and New Seasons Market. “It would
go into the reward-risk calculations. Everybody knows he had rehab
issues, and that’s part of the mystique.”

As
part of the deal, Glenn and Shobi Dahl remained on the Dave’s Killer
Bread board of directors but stepped down as chairman and CEO,
respectively. Dave Dahl remained president of the company.

In
2013, Dahl bought his second house in Milwaukie, and a cabin in Zigzag, a
town in Mount Hood National Forest. He also bought a new Chevrolet
Corvette and a Cadillac Escalade.

By spring, however, the company knew he was struggling.

In
late May, Dahl went to a rehab clinic in Utah, according to two longtime
friends. They say he was compelled by an intervention from family and
employees. Text messages sent by Dahl to a friend show that by August,
after returning from rehab, he was on leave from the bakery.

Other events during the summer point to Dahl drinking to excess.

On Aug. 3, a
39-year-old former meth addict named Christopher Aaron Isaac Dailey went
to stay with Dahl for a “boys’ night” at Dahl’s cabin in Zigzag.
Dailey’s family members say he and Dahl met a decade ago in a prison van
coming from Snake River Correctional Institution.

What took place at
the cabin is recounted in a missing-person report filed on Dailey with
the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, and statements made by Barbara
Lively, Dailey’s longtime partner, more than a week later.

“Mr.
Dahl has been having alcohol troubles and believed he needed time with
the guys to cope,” Lively told a sheriff’s detective Aug. 20, according
to the report. “She thought Mr. Dahl was also leaning on Mr. Dailey, who
had been sober.”

That
night, Lively told the detective, Dailey called her to confess he had
been drinking—he told her Dahl had brought booze to the Zigzag cabin.
“Ms. Lively said Mr. Dahl had brought the alcohol to the cabin,” the
missing-person report says. “She told me she was scared because Mr.
Dailey ‘doesn’t mix well with alcohol.’”

The
Escalade was recovered in Fairview later that day, but Dailey had
vanished. On Sept. 24, his body was found in a field alongside a
blackberry bramble and a paint shop in Lents. His death is under
investigation by Portland police.

Lively
blames Dahl for starting the chain of events that led to Dailey’s
death. “The person I love was sitting for so long over in those
blackberry bushes,” she says. “It just makes me sick.”

GIVING TESTIMONY: Dave Dahl has regularly delivered speeches on his turnaround, including this one to the Oregon Department of Transportation in 2010.

IMAGE: Oregon DOT

Dave Dahl declined through his attorney, Stephen Houze, to answer WW’s
questions regarding Dailey’s death, allegations of his drinking, and
the Nov. 14 incidents at the Breadquarters and with Washington County
sheriff deputies.

In a statement, Houze said Dahl could not comment because of the pending criminal charges.

“However,”
Houze added, “Mr. Dahl and his entire family wish to express their
appreciation for the concern, support and respect for his privacy that
has been shown by so many during his recent mental health crisis.”

Dave’s
Killer Bread has posted an FAQ about the events on Nov. 14 on its
website.It poses the question whether Dahl was “under the influence” at
the bakery outlet store: “We don’t know.”

About
10 pm on Nov. 14, Washington County sheriff’s deputies responded to a
disturbance call at 2455 SW Timberline Drive in Cedar Hills—the home of
Bill McShane, a personal investment adviser with Umpqua Investments.

A
woman called to report Dahl was acting erratically. Deputies arrived in
two patrol cars as Dahl was leaving in his black Cadillac Escalade. He
rammed one of the patrol cars head-on. Deputies pursued him in their
cars for a half-mile down Timberline Drive. Cornered, Dahl twice rammed
another patrol car before being pinned by a third.

The Washington County sheriff and district attorney’s offices declined WW’s
request to release information about whether Dahl had alcohol or drugs
in his system at the time of his arrest. Both offices say those records
are sealed while the case remains open. McShane bailed Dahl out of jail,
and Dahl is on leave as president of the bread company. On Nov. 19,
Bain, Dahl’s fiancee, posted a message on her Facebook page she said was
written by Dahl.

“The
most challenging circumstances can be used to bring about miraculous
change in our lives,” the message says, “and that’s my plan for the
future.”

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

News
East Portland can't catch a break.Just this week KGW had a story called, "Diverse, non-cool East Por... More